How scrappy Canadian stood up to Trump — in 1984
John Bassett vowed to punch out ‘insensitive’ American rival in dispute over football league
When a man from a prominent Toronto family threatened to punch Donald Trump in the mouth, he employed a distinctly Canadian tone. John Bassett wrote that he would have no regrets “whatsoever” in punching his American colleague in the face, but made sure to end his seven-paragraph letter with “kindest personal regards.”
In the summer of 1984, Bassett, an entrepreneur from a family of media barons, was only months from revealing his battle with brain cancer. He was also a passionate owner in the United States Football League, battling for its soul with Trump, a 38-year-old New York real estate magnate.
Then, as now, Trump had a habit of bullying his American colleagues. The Canadian would not be bullied. “He was a great typer — with two fingers, like a madman,” his widow, Susan Bassett-Klauber, said with a laugh. “You’d never seen a typewriter being more furiously attacked.”
Bassett was a son of John W.H. Bassett, a long-time owner of the Toronto Argonauts, a stakeholder in Maple Leaf Gardens and a newspaper publisher who also founded Baton Broadcasting. The son also went into sports, enduring time in two failed leagues — the World Hockey Association and then the World Football League — before building what was widely acknowledged as the model franchise in the fledgling USFL.
The USFL began play in the spring of1983 with the goal of exploiting the quiet space in the professional football calendar, when the National Football League was shut down for the summer.
Bassett owned the Tampa Bay Bandits, and he was an adept marketer.
Actor Burt Reynolds was invited aboard as a minority shareholder, using his star power to draw attention while his partner, actor Loni Anderson, appeared on billboards around Tampa. (Several billboards were mysteriously torn down. “I guarantee they ended up in somebody’s college dorm,” Jim McVay, the team’s former marketing director, said.)
The Bandits were known to draw more than 40,000 fans to home games. Bassett was a popular owner among his players, too, taking them out for dinner and inviting them into his home for pool parties.
“I only wear a suit when I go to the bank,” Bassett told Sports Illustrated in 1983. “My hair is short when I’m raising money and long when I’m spending it.”
“He had a sense of humour, he was self-effacing — he was basically everything that Trump wasn’t.” said Charley Steiner, the play-by-play voice of the rival New Jersey Generals, the team Trump bought after its inaugural season.
“Donald was a big, loud-mouthed guy from New York — a precursor of what Donald Trump would become thirty-something years later.”
The two were destined to clash, and clash they did. Bassett wanted the USFL to remain in the spring, building slowly into a sustainable concern. Trump wanted to be aggressive, sign big players away from the NFL and, ultimately, move the USFL into a fall schedule to compete head-to-head with the big league.
U.S.-based sports historian Denis Crawford, who is working on a biography about Bassett — the working title, hatched by Bassett’s son John: “Johnny F. Bassett: All the fun life would allow” — notes that Bassett may have been a “blueblood,” but he was a scrappy one.
“He never went to bed hungry as a child . . . but man, when he got his dander up, he would fight like somebody who grew up on the streets,” he said.
Bassett drew fines from the league’s head office for speaking against any suggestion the league should move to the fall. He threatened to withdraw the Bandits from the USFL if other owners moved away from the spring. He suggested starting another league. Other owners stood with him, quietly.
He kept fighting through the early months of 1985, even after it was revealed he had been diagnosed with two malignant brain tumours. Bas- sett had endured two rounds with melanoma a decade earlier, and resigned to fight the disease again.
“As Bassett got weaker,” Crawford said, “Trump got bolder.”
Ultimately, owners decided to move the USFL to the fall. It never staged another football game, dying after only three seasons. For decades, debate has raged over Trump’s guilt in its death.
The letter from Bassett resurfaced earlier this month when Jeff Pearlman, a veteran sports reporter in the U.S. working on a book about the USFL, published it on his website. In it, Bassett listed several Trump offences — “insensitive and denigrating comments” — saying he would punch him the next time “you personally scorn me, or anyone else, who does not happen to salute and dance to your tune.”
Bassett-Klauber said she recognized the tone and the signature. Her husband died in May 1986, less than two years after he mailed the letter. They were a month shy of celebrating their 26th wedding anniversary. He was 47.
“That definitely was his letter,” she said. “Because he wrote it with humour, and he wrote it with decorum. But it was just, ‘C’mon, smarten up — I really think I should come down and punch you in (the) mouth.’ ”